What your get is not what your may want to see?

This is a good read...

How Google And Bing Maps Control What You Can See

Behind the scenes of the most powerful maps in the history of the Earth. And how Google, Microsoft, DigitalGlobe, and the world's governments decide what does — and doesn't — belong on its surface.

In early February, Wired published a satellite photo of a desert structure in southern Saudi Arabia. The image, screencapped from Bing Maps, corresponded with a report that the CIA had built secret drone bases in the region. The site was available on any computer with a web browser, but appeared to be legit — Bing Maps, which is owned by Microsoft, had effectively outed a closely guarded intelligence secret.

If you went to the same location in Google Maps, however, you'd find nothing but desert.
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What's most remarkable about these mapping services is the lack of transparency in how they work, who regulates them, and how the maps are built. Every major mapping service draws from many sources for its imagery and metadata, but their processes for combining the information are proprietary and guarded — the public gets statements along the lines of the one provided by Google, whose spokeperson told BuzzFeed: "We strive to publish the most useful imagery possible, and take into account many factors when determining which imagery is optimal, such as its date, resolution and clarity. If the updates we receive from data providers improve the overall imagery of an area, we may elect to publish the imagery even if the provider has blurred certain portions."

This makes straight omission — the purest form of censorship — very hard to identify. And even if it is identified, its causes are even harder to suss out.

"The data set that Google owns became some kind of de facto gold standard," says Geens. It is, to an extent never seen in human history, the map of record — not just of relative locations on the Earth's surface, but of geopolitical reality. To casual users, these maps give an impression of completeness and infallibly — they appear on your screen with an instantaneousness and ease that belies their complexity, and conceals a long and complex information supply chain.

The reality of digital mapping is less comforting: the tools that provide us with unprecedented transparency are controlled in deeply opaque ways.